Counterpoint: all of the identity-verification flows I have experienced in the last few years used NFC to read the chip in my identity documents - from car rental apps to my bank doing KYC.

If anything, verifying NFC is easier than images. Asking the chip in my identity card to provide a cryptographically-signed "This document belongs to Jane Doe" request is a handful of lines of code. Doing the same with images? Good luck coming up with an approach which isn't fooled by a photocopy!

Cool! Where are you geographically? I’m mostly in North America, Europe and South Asia.

ICAO doc 9303 validation is about 10 lines in Python (on top of importing the right packages) last time I did it around 2012. I doubt it has become harder since then.

Was the public key directory even operational in 2012? What about revocation checking?

I think processing that information is mandatory now, but probably was optional/largely unimplemented in 2012. But maybe I'm off by five years or so?

Revocation checking seems like a big gap, yeah. I’m not aware of any public revocation lists (but I’m also not super familiar with the industry), so I can only assume (hope?) that there are some shadowy but highly accurate databases that KYC providers are tapping into.

The CA public key I just got off my country’s website, they were kind enough to just publish it :)

My credit card company’s app (in Europe) reads my ID through NFC when logging in for the first time (besides requiring ID photos).

Our national app for logging into government sites and confirming things also requires a step where the ID’s NFC is read to reach the highest trust level.

So it’s definitely becoming more and more common here.